Irish Brewery Advertisements: Castlebellingham Bitter Ale

I am quite partial to old Irish beer advertisements and this is a nice one for Castlebellingham Brewery in Louth for their bitter ale, which appeared in Ireland's Saturday Night newspaper in October 1908. The wording - and those shamrocks - certainly mark it as promotion to drink Irish beer, as well as focussing on both its value and quality.

I felt it needed a wider audience and it is good to be highlighting something other than porter adverts from our history.

This might be a weekly series if there is enough interest in this kind of thing ...?

Liam K.

(I have cleaned, tidied and sharpened the image a little, hopefully without overdoing it ...)

All written content and the research involved in publishing it here is my own unless otherwise stated and cannot be reproduced elsewhere without permission, full credit to its source, and a link back to this post. Newspaper image is © The British Library Board - All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk) from whom I have received permission to display this image on this site.

Pub Fiction: The Stars beneath the Sea ...

My favourite pub, The Stars beneath the Sea, sits on a narrow, cobbled street a short ten-minute walk from my home. There are well-worn limestone steps and a cold metal handrail that leads up to a creaky door, and inwards to a brightly lit room with huge gothic-shaped windows on two sides. Dust motes eternally hang in the sunlight, twisting and turning but appearing to never land.

The double height space has a gallery wrapping around all four sides, bisecting the windows on the two sides and a rusty-orange brick wall on the others, it is accessed by a shaky spiral staircase. The walls are covered in rare breweriana and the chairs and tables are all oak or beech, worn smooth by a thousand drinkers. The floor is timber too and looks like it was reclaimed from a ship, as indeed it possibly was.

The bar counter is dark marble, streaked with glittering white threads and cool to the touch - never sticky. The barstools have bottom-shaped but unpadded seats, and the arms wrap around you snugly when you sit, like the embrace of a loved one. There is a hanger for your coat under the countertop and a brass footrest for your feet - well-polished but reassuringly scratched and scuffed in places.

There is a cast iron stove - or two.

The pub serves three well kept beers on cask as well as five on tap - and there is always a stout, a mild or a brown ale available - with a small selection of corked and caged interesting bottled beers. Pints are served - not too cold - in conical glasses, and half-pints in the elegant pilsner shape. Bottles are presented with over-sized Worthington glasses and I am always allowed to uncork and pour my own. Regardless of the choice you make, the bar mat always matches the beer.

The barperson can judge your mood to know if you want the companionship of polite conversation, or to be left alone with your own thoughts, or if you just seek the comfort of a good book. The other patrons of the bar are quiet and respect the sanctity of the surroundings, the talk low just below the not-loud volume of the music, which is jazz and no later than 1970.

The food - served all day, every day - is a selection of pies or sausages, served with a cheesy mash and three types of gravy. There are no crisps, no chocolate, no corn-flavoured snacks, but there are pickled eggs, cubes of anonymous cheese and slices of charcuterie served with white pepper and celery salt. Soft napkins are always supplied, as are tiny metal forks.

There is a cat - or two.

Sturdy French windows lead onto a veranda that hangs precariously over a slow-flowing river, populated with ducks and black swans, and an otter on occasion. There are barges tied up close by and there are tall, repurposed mills, factories and warehouses along the quays opposite, and at just the right time of day their bricks glow golden in the sunlight.

When it gets dark the lights are dimmed and a candle burns on every table, flickering and dancing in time with the music. There are reading lights in certain sections, and a bookcase filled with short story books of every type. Newspapers are also provided and always return neatly and intact to their rack, never a page missing, but occasionally a crossword done.

There is no standing allowed, even at the bar, no one jostles your elbow or leans too close to you. All are welcome and all who enter this sanctum abide by the unwritten rules. There are no arguments, no rumourmongering and no lies being given wings. There is just a sense of calm and contentment, emphasised only by the quarter-hour chimes of the ancient clock that hangs above the bar…

I will have a pint - or two.

Liam K.

(With apologies to George Orwell …)

That Porter Pour: Another 'High-Low' Film

Every now an again I tweet something and immediately think that I should probably have recorded it in a more easy-to-find and more permanent place like here. That was certainly the case a while back when I found what I believe to be only the second film of the high-low porter pour in action. By now most people with an interest in the subject are aware of the old method of pouring a pint of porter from two naturally carbonated casks which usually sat on the bar. The first pour was from the fresher, more highly carbonated cask, which was then blended in the glass with porter from a lower carbonated older cask. This was supposedly the origin of the gimmicky modern stout pour, cleverly developed by Guinness to mimic the effect in appearance - if nothing else.

The most famous film is this one from the BBC’s lament to the porter’s death in 1973. People have put up other videos supposedly showing the high/low too, but they do not look quite right. Some showing a pour from a modern-ish keg and others showing porter being poured from a jug into a glass - this appears to be just a way of calming down a fresh keg at a very busy Irish music festival.

But in the Northern Ireland Digital Film Archive I found a short clip called the ‘Drinks Flowing in Dirty Dicks’ from 1965 that appears to show the proper high-low pour, with a pint glass being filled with a foaming fresh porter from one tap and then being topped up with a less active cask, as you can see from the how the dark liquid starts to fill up the bottom of the glass. The pint probably needed another top-up and scrape - and we must remember this was being done for a camera, which might also explain why it was not left to rest. (I am aware that the video might not show in all locations, but try reloading the page if you get an error.)

It is worth mentioning again that this sort of pour was probably not something that was done throughout Ireland in the mid-twentieth century. I also wonder if it just arrived with the advent of those tapped countertop casks? Was it used for stout as well as porter? Again I doubt it was or I certainly believe it was not common if it did exist. In a country where The Bottle of Stout was king it is fair to say the vast majority of stout consumed in Ireland was bottled by the plethora of commercial bottlers and by the pubs who bottled their own. I also do not believe that porter in any form but especially on cask was extremely common(?) outside of the major cities from early in the 20th century onward ...

Lots of questions there I admit, but I worry at times that we are trying to rewrite our brewing history to suit our modern perceptions of what we assume was done instead of sticking to the actual facts of what we know, and can see or read about. As I have said before, we all make errors - including myself - but we certainly do not use the words ‘maybe’, ‘perhaps’ and ‘possibly’ enough - not to mention the wonderful ‘I don’t know…’

Liam K.

(All written content and the research involved in publishing it here is my own unless otherwise stated and can not be reproduced elsewhere without full credit to its source and a link back to this post.)

Brewing History: Dark Mild Ale inside The Pale?

Unless you have been living under a large rock you will be aware of Beer Twitter’s current obsession with Dark Mild ales, and although most of the noise on this topic is coming from across The Small Pond the cry has been taken up in certain circles in Ireland too. Currently there is a scarcity of that style on these shores apart from one notable - in every way - exception from Four Provinces Brewery, although there are probably some that would argue that certain brown ales - and perhaps even porters - are close in many ways to that style.

But it would be a mistake to think that this was a beer that was never popular in Ireland - and I use the word popular in a relative manner, as obviously it was those ubiquitous drinks called stouts and porters that ruled here for much of our relatively short ‘proper’ brewing history. It is probably better just to say that ‘mild’ ales, even dark ones, were being brewed and drunk here in the not-so-distant past. A good example is a beer that is awaiting bottling in my fermenter which was/is a dark coloured XX ale from Perry’s Brewery in Rathdowney in county Laois, that I am fairly sure could only be called a ‘Dark Mild’? Annoyingly the Perry brewing records that I have seen do not record their beers as ‘Milds’ in their records, just X and XX ales, but as I have shown previously the use of the word mild with either a small or large M was in quite common use in Ireland for a long period. Perry’s certainly used the word ‘Mild’ on their bottle labels so they appear to have used one term for the recipes and another for their marketing. (I am aware that ‘Mild’ at one time meant fresh in that same way that ‘Stale’ meant stored/aged but as the language changed I am also sure that over here at least Mild became a word for - well - a mild tasting ale that was relatively low in bitterness.)

With all of that in mind I would like to share an advertisement from The Irish Independent in 1915 for D’Arcy’s Anchor Brewery on Usher Street in Dublin where they specifically point out the colour of their ales:

Here we see that under their O’Connell’s Dublin Ales brand they were selling a Dark Extra Strong ale and a Pale Mild on draught - and let us not forget a rare mention for an Irish Best Bitter for bottling! Allowing for dubious marketing and the leeway that advertisement writers have with the truth this might be a nice mention for a Strong Dark Mild? Even if I am stretching terminology, styles and descriptions to the limit then if nothing else it is a nice record of what D’Arcy’s were brewing at this time. If we look at the table I previously posted on the strengths of Irish beers just prior to this period we can see that O’Connell’s Strong Ale varied from 5.1% to 5.5% in alcohol content and although we should not really make any assumptions as to how bitter it was - and alcohol strength has no bearing on a ‘Mild’ anyway as we know - it still seems to point the finger at there being a draught dark ale available in Dublin at the start of the 20th century that was not classed as porter or stout.

Hardly an earth-shattering find or observation but still of note.

Incidentally, D’Arcy’s were also brewing an ‘I.E.P. Ale’ (East India Pale Ale) in 1907, so they seem to have had a relatively interesting range of ales, although this could be what morphed into the ‘Best Bitter’ from 1915 perhaps? As ever, lack of information on our brewing past leads to much guesswork, 'maybes' and - perhaps - dubious assumptions …

Liam K.

Newspaper images © Independent News and Media PLC. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk). 

(All written content and the research involved in publishing it here is my own unless otherwise stated and can not be reproduced elsewhere without full credit to its source and a link back to this post.)